Before audiences knew Dennis Haskins as Bayside High’s perpetually exasperated principal, he was helping build a theater community in his hometown of Chattanooga. The actor, who played Richard ‘Mr. Belding’ across the Saved by the Bell universe, died Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026, at 75. The Los Angeles Times reported the date and cited his longtime friend and caretaker Kimberly Snow; the Associated Press separately reported that his agent, Jay Schachter, confirmed the death on Tuesday, Sept. 29.
Haskins’ public image was tied to a TV school, but his connection to education and performance started well before the set. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s archival biography says he acted in campus drama productions, worked as a stage manager and helped found the Harlequins, a community theater group. He also wrote original plays, including one the archive describes as created ‘for the students, by the students, and free.’ Those details sketch a young performer interested not only in being onstage, but in helping create places where other people could take part.
That same instinct showed up in his student government work. As entertainment chairman, Haskins organized movies and concerts; UTC’s archive records that he brought Ike and Tina Turner to campus in April 1973. He also helped organize an annual ‘Freaks vs. Fuzz’ basketball game, pairing students with community members, including city commissioners. The proceeds supported two scholarships for children of UTC and Chattanooga police officers. It was a campus fundraiser with a local purpose: a lively event whose proceeds helped students continue their education. At 65, he returned to UTC and earned a bachelor of arts degree in theater in 2015, WUTC reported.
Haskins eventually carried his love of performance into television. UTC’s record says he began playing Belding in Good Morning, Miss Bliss in 1988; the show was reworked as NBC’s Saved by the Bell the following year. He stayed with the character into Saved by the Bell: The New Class through 2000, giving the fictional principal a longer life than the original Bayside run. The students’ schemes supplied the comedy, but Belding was the steady adult presence who kept turning up to meet them, whether or not they made it easy.
The role became a shared reference point for generations of viewers. In 2015, Haskins joined several original cast members in a Tonight Show reunion sketch, a small return to a school that had long since graduated its first class. Later, people who had known him away from the cameras remembered a performer who kept showing up for fans. In its report, the Associated Press quoted Schachter, his agent and longtime friend, saying Haskins loved his fans and always made time for them.
Snow’s account, reported by the Times, offers a glimpse of that connection in a different setting: Dimples Karaoke, a now-closed Burbank gathering place where Haskins liked to sing, meet people and take pictures with fans. Snow said patrons sometimes thought he owned the place because he was such a familiar presence there. He did not; what made it feel like his ‘second home,’ in her words, was the time he spent with the people who came through.
There is a pleasing symmetry between that remembered welcome and the character that made Haskins famous. Mr. Belding was often interrupted, outmaneuvered or made the punchline, yet his return was part of the ritual: the principal would come back, ask what was going on, and make room for another round of teenage mischief. Haskins played the joke with patience and warmth, giving the show an adult who could be flustered without becoming cruel.
His life’s work stretched from student theater and scholarship fundraisers in Chattanooga to a television role that audiences continued to revisit decades later. Those are different kinds of stages, but both depend on people gathering around a performance. In Haskins’ case, colleagues and friends remembered the entertainer who made time for fans; his university archive preserves the younger organizer who helped put on shows and direct proceeds toward local students. The familiar principal may have belonged to Bayside, but the impulse to bring people together was already there in Chattanooga.
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